It has in all cases been the worst enemy with which society has had to contend.” Page 56: “However great the natural resources of a country, fertile its soil, intelligent, enterprising and industrious its inhabitants—if the volume of money is shrinking and prices falling, its merchants will be overwhelmed with bankruptcy, industries paralyzed, and destitution and distrust will prevail.” Page 59: “All respectable authorities agree as to the relative effects of an increasing and decreasing money.... History records no such disastrous transition as that from the Roman empire to the dark ages. In the Christian era the metallic money of the Roman empire amounted to $1,800,000,000. By the end of the fifteenth century it had shrunk to less than $200,000,000. Population dwindled, and commerce, arts, wealth and freedom all disappeared.” _Henry C. Carey, LL. D._ (“Social Science,” page 297): “Money tends to diminish the obstacles interposed between the producer and the consumer precisely as do railroads and mills.... The most necessary part of the machinery of exchange being that which facilitates the passage of labor and its products from hand to hand, any diminution of its quantity is felt with tenfold more severity than is the diminution of the quantity of railroad cars or steamboats.” Before the Congressional committee: “We next find him [Secretary McCulloch] issuing the destructive Fort Wayne decree, by means of which we were made to know that the currency was in excess and prices too high; that the policy of the treasury was to be one of contraction; and that unfortunate debtors must as speedily as possible place themselves in a position to meet the shock to be thus created. In other words, all debtors were required to sell, capitalists meanwhile being advised not to buy, the government being determined that labor, lands, houses, stocks and property of all other descriptions should be promptly reduced to gold values.” Treatise on “Wealth”: “A period of contracted currency is one of embarrassment, difficulty, and generally, in the end, of insolvency to the small farmer and moderate landholder.... It will rise in price from that scarcity, and become accessible only to the more rich and affluent classes.” [This greatest of American political economists, the late Henry C. Carey, estimated the cost of contraction in order to secure resumption between the years of 1873 and 1879 at thirty billion dollars.] _Henry Carey Baird_ (March 13, 1882): “The man who has the greatest horror of the inflation of the currency generally has no horror of the inflation of bank credits. He likes it because it increases his power over his fellow men. What he objects to is the inflation of the people which causes an increase of their power.” September 3, 1889: “People know that the expansion of the currency means life, and equally well that contraction means death.”